Prolegomena
As I reread Carr’s article I thought of the question in the class; what would an out of space visitor think reading this article? What if this visitor then proceeds to read our class material in sequence and use some superior ability to tap into our data and information resources to backfill missing pieces in his understanding of our planet and its inhabitants? The data and resources need not to be limited to written format but to everything that we used and use to store information, communicate, express ourselves, including culture, ways, arts, structures, landscapes, cities, and any type of human construct physical or intellectual. We always communicate something with the presence and form of the above, with their variability as well with their absence. I am certain that we all have been in a situation where we communicate much more by not talking (relationships and marriage comes to mind!)
There are multitudes of ways we communicate and convey information on a day to day basis or from generation to generation to generation, from a previous era to next era and so forth. We even broadcast a sequence of numbers in binary code (we think that no matter how different other civilizations might be, for them to venture outside their solar system or galaxy they would have to be scientifically and technologically advanced, meaning they would have mastered mathematics, the language/coding of science) hoping that if there is life somewhere in our universe they will receive it and hopefully will acknowledge it (let’s hope they would be peaceful too).
A word of caution for my group and whoever reads this blog.
My training is in engineering, mathematics, information technology, and business and finance. Writing outside highly specialized and structured subjects, is very difficult and doesn’t come natural to me. I hate it! English is not even my first language but started learning it around the age of 20.
My writing might seem unpolished and even have errors and require editing. I only ask for your patience and understanding. Finally, any editing and other suggestions (email me please) would be much appreciated and I see this as an opportunity to improve myself in this area.
But I thought long and hard how to approach the blog writing for what I think are universal questions and subjects that we are dealing with here and the progression and evolution of our civilization. I felt that the best way to approach the various themes of this course is, where is possible, through a narrative.
I would like before I start with my narrative to present a formalized model of a communication system. I would draw from my electrical engineering background and present the communication system as it was developed by Claude Shannon. He was one of those rare individuals that come along once in a while and illuminate a particular field of human or scientific endeavor. He single handedly developed the theory of information, or communications as he called it, in a matter of years in the 1940s. He developed this new field “out of necessity,” that of decoding the communications of the Germans during WWII. It was the Greeks who said that “necessity is the mother of all inventions.”
William Poundstone gives a fascinating account of Shannon and his work in his equally fascinating book “Fortune’s Formula” where he tells the story of using science to beat casinos and Wall Street.
Shannon, in his classic 1948 paper he wrote…”The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point exactly or approximately a message selected at another point.”
Shannon’s linear communications model is depicted below.
Imagine in some distant future where a society uses the above model to communicate. What kind of society that would be? How might this society get to this state? Would it be the result of its evolution that will create the need for this type of communication or it would be the discovery/invention of technological breakthroughs, allowing machine like communication, which will bring about this society?
I had exactly the same reaction to Shannon's model as the critic you cite: there is no human element at all. One of the big challenges to human communication is that the initial message is often unclear - even to the person attempting to express it. Even the most articulate among us find it difficult to know exactly what mean to say, then to say (or write, as you acknowledge) exactly what we mean. But perhaps the cold technicality of the model is exactly why it raises interesting questions, as you suggest at the end of your post.
ReplyDeleteThe Shannon model is interesting. It's an almost Platonic model of communication -- using the term "Platonic" informally: the information source strictly precedes the transmission, and when the information arrives at the destination it resides there.
ReplyDeleteIn models of human communication and cognition, some cognitive scientists invert -- or at least muddle -- that causation, proposing that meaning arises in part from the act of communicating. (I'm thinking here of Dan Dennett's Consciousness Explained - the most relevant passage is conveniently quoted at https://pantherfile.uwm.edu/wash/www/dennettspeak.htm about halfway down the page.)
Are you familiar with REST, the design philosophy of HTTP and the web? There's a model of communication embedded in it which is very compelling.